A celebrated painter once heard a woman of this stamp commended as “very graceful.” “Graceful!” he indignantly exclaimed, “weakness isn't grace! strength and agility are the conditions of grace.”
One of the services of true art is to hold before us models of beauty which keep the eye pure amid the corruptions of fashion. The Diana does not suggest any training of corsets or wearing of long skirts, yet poetry and fiction have helped to perpetuate this idea of the lady. Shakespeare has given us his Ophelia and Desdemona, creations of this false theory, and I have heard men declare them to be perfect types of womanhood. In Ruffini's charming story of Doctor Antonio, we have the same lovely heroine in our prosaic modern life. But mark how all these women utterly fail in the great hours of trial. All untrue to the demands of their love, all incapable of mating the men who have sought them. But in Portia, in Miranda, in Imogen, we have women in whom is all the charm of womanhood without its exaggeration; they are independent noble existences, capable of living alone, and therefore able to meet nobly all the conditions of life and of love.[28]
We can almost forgive Charles Reade's later flippant creations of women, in whom moral weakness is considered as great a charm as physical delicacy, when we remember the charming picture of health and vigor which he first gave us in “Christie Johnstone.”
But while this admirable modesty of nature is the finest grace of humanity, yet there are limits which cannot safely be overpassed. Nature rarely suffers one sex really to pass the common boundary and take on the special attributes of the other, seeming only to permit these extreme cases as warning and landmark. The contralto in woman and the tenor in man are delightful, but when the woman's voice is bass or the man's treble the impression is ludicrous.
In due time the great distinction of sex rightly asserts itself, and the delicate distinctions between man and woman, so easy to feel and so difficult to state, begin to be recognized. Then the broad general law of humanity will come to a more definite and varied expression in special natures. And although the mother will never forget the common ground of humanity which must underlie all training, she will prepare to meet the peculiar claims of her daughter's nature, and help her to understand and appreciate her needs and her powers.
The child instinctively begins to inquire into physiological questions concerning marriage, birth, etc. There is but one way in which such questions should be met—with perfect truth in perfect reverence. To little children, utterly incapable of understanding the truth, the pretty fables of the stork or the angel may be harmless, but all earnest inquiries should be met with the simple truth as far as it can be understood, and the promise of full explanation whenever the mind is mature to receive it. The mother should anticipate this natural need of the mind for knowledge, and should prepare her daughter for initiation into the higher mysteries of human life by an acquaintance with life in its simpler forms, where it is not complicated by human passions. The functions of reproduction in vegetable life are the natural method of instruction, and lead the way to a recognition of the sacredness and beauty of the whole subject. The child's delight in the flowers of the field is easily deepened into intellectual instruction by pointing out the functions of the various organs and their beautiful adaption to use. In the care with which variety is sought the important lesson against intermarriage may be recognized, which fable and theology has surrounded with such fearful imaginings.
Next, the care of domestic animals will naturally interest the child, and from her kittens and her hens she will learn much, without excitement or effort, that will form a basis for the higher truths of human physiology.
The mother should thus always anticipate in her own mind the needs of the daughter, and prepare her for the changes in her physical condition which will come with maturity, in the simplest, the tenderest, and the most reverent manner. Everything approaching to levity or coarseness of speech should be utterly avoided, so that, while the young girl will speak frankly and without shame to her mother or her physician, she will shun light speaking to chance companions as she would blasphemy.[29] And here the great lesson of a high standard of health should be re-enforced. There is no function of woman's nature which in its right exercise does not tend to strengthen, refresh, and revivify her physical and mental powers. If healthy, no one need interfere with any rational enjoyment, any reasonable amount of intellectual labor, or necessary work. All functions will be best regulated by a full, harmonious, normal development of all. And in physiology as in religion, the grand paradox holds true, “that he who loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth it for my sake shall find it.”
There is no surer way to destroy the health than to care for nothing beside it; and the most important condition for the young girl approaching maturity is to have her thoughts turned from herself to wide and large interests, and to have her mind and body healthily and regularly occupied. When any organ is feeble or diseased, the thing most to be avoided is fastening the mind upon its functions, so that nervous irritability or congestion is produced. And yet, as I have constantly intimated, the actual mother has to deal not alone with ideal womanhood, in full possession of a birthright of health, but very likely with a feeble and diseased being, who develops new forms of evil in every crisis of life. There she must be the watchful guardian, and recognize the limitations of her individual child, and with wise provision apportion the tasks and the pleasures to her peculiar needs.
While all sickness is the result of broken law, it is rarely mainly the sufferer's own fault; and the mother will tenderly and lovingly shield her sickly child, and show her the rich compensations which are possible to her in mental and spiritual life, though she should never fall into the morbid error of believing physical weakness to be the most favorable condition of spiritual welfare.